Category Archives: Journalism

COAL SHOWS WHY MARKETS DON’T WORK

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Tribune leader, 16 October 1992

The pit closure plan announced by British Coal on Tuesday is an unmiti­gated social disaster. Some 30,000 workers in the coal industry will lose their jobs, some of them today. Perhaps twice that number of workers in related industries will join the dole queue as the coal industry contracts. Large areas of Britain will be left jobless.
And all for what? According to British Coal, the closure plan is inevitable be­cause of lack of demand for its coal. Mar­ket forces dictate that it take drastic ac­tion to match its supply to the demand.
Yet the reason for this lack of demand is the way in which the Government pri­vatised electricity. It created two giant generating companies, PowerGen and Na­tional Power, with complete freedom to buy their coal where they like and to re­place coal with gas if they choose.
Unlike nuclear power, which was care­fully hived off and protected from the ravages of the market place, the coal in­dustry was earmarked for privatisation and deliberately exposed to a market in which two giant customers could dictate terms.
The generating companies’ decisions to buy cheaper imported coal and to “dash for gas” made British Coal’s short-term position impossible. Or rather, it made it impossible until devaluation. The col­lapse of sterling in the past month has priced back into competitiveness many of the pits chosen for closure.
Even taking into account only short-term market factors, the closure list is ridiculously long. 
If one looks at the decision from a longer-term perspective, it looks com­pletely absurd. Gas is cheap right now, al­though not if the costs of building new gas-fired power stations are included. But domestic reserves of natural gas will run out within 20 years. Similarly, although imported coal is cheap now, there is no reason to expect that it will always be so. Then there are the deleterious effects of coal imports on the already burgeoning balance of trade deficit.
In short, coal is a classic case of an in­dustry that cannot simply be left to the ravages of the market. What it needed from the state was long-term strategic planning and investment. What it got from this government was, at best, ne­glect and, at worst, irrational hostility.
Miners are understandably angry at the way they have been treated, thrown on to the scrap-heap despite massive increases in their productivity. No one should be surprised if that anger expresses itself in support for in­dustrial action. If the miners do vote to strike, they will not only deserve the support of every other trade unionist in Britain but need it. They will surely be defeated if they are left to stand alone.
If, on the other hand, they decide that a strike would be unwinnable, that deci­sion too will deserve respect. In the depths of a slump, it would not be unrea­sonable for miners to see a decent redundancy pay-off as a better prospect than months on the picket line with nothing in the end to show for it.

THE BLOCK VOTE HAS TO GO

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Tribune leader, 9 October 1992

Labour’s conference decisions last week on the party’s links with the unions were a mixed bag.
Looking on the bright side, all of the conference votes insist on maintenance of strong links between party and unions. And none of them really ties the hands of Labour’s working party on union links on the question of reforming the union role in parliamentary selections and leader­ship elections. Some sort of system which ensures that trade union members who pay the political levy are given individual votes is perfectly compatible with every­thing decided in Blackpool last week, and the working party should now push ahead with a report on the various feasi­ble options.
At the same time, however, the conference votes do limit the working party’s deliberations when it comes to the block vote at Labour conference  – and that is anything but good news, for the block vote is the element of the party-union re­lationship most in need of no-holds-barred critical examination.
Of course, one problem with the block vote was addressed last week: its sheer weight, which has meant for years now that a handful of union leaders have had the ability to determine party policy re­gardless of what anyone else thinks. The unions will now control 70 per cent of conference votes rather than 90 per cent, But, welcome as this move is, it does not go very far. Even with just half of con­ference votes controlled by union leaders (the likely next stage), a handful of union leaders will still be able effectively to de­termine party policy, particularly if all the union mergers currently under dis­cussion go ahead. Even with one-third or one-quarter of the votes, the union lead­ers would have too much power. It is the block vote itself which is the problem: it is an essentially undemocratic institu­tion. By effectively voting to rule out abo­lition last week, the Labour conference did itself a grave disservice.

A missed opportunity on education
Quite the most stupid and craven de­cision at Labour conference last week was the little-noticed defeat of Com­posite 42, which called for abolition of the charitable status of public schools and demanded an end to religious segre­gation in education.
Why did the conference do it? There is no conceivable justification for public schools retaining charitable status: they are profitable businesses that do im­mense social harm and should no more be given tax breaks than tobacco conglomer­ates.
The idea that the state should sanction and subsidise the stuffing of children’s brains with the nonsense of religion is equally offensive to all but those afflicted with religious belief. If parents want their children brain-washed, there is plenty of time for it outside school hours.

GOULD IS A BIG LOSS

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Tribune leader, 2 October 1992

Not for the first time, the biggest excitement of this week’s Labour conference came before it    formally opened. The dramatic resignation of Bryan Gould from the Shadow Cabinet has overshadowed everything else that has happened in Blackpool this week.
Although Tribunedisagrees with Mr Gould over Europe and economic policy, the issues on which he decided that he could not accept Shadow Cabinet collec­tive responsibility, we regret his decision to go.
It is not that his position is incompre­hensible. Mr Gould’s core beliefs about management of the economy (he remains a stalwart of the “Keynesianism in one country” school) are radically at odds with the “co-ordinated European refla­tion” approach taken by the Labour lead­ership and overwhelmingly endorsed by this week’s conference.
It is hardly surprising that Mr Gould decided that a life of back-bench freedom was preferable to four years of sitting on his hands, particularly given his experi­ence between 1989 and last April. Then Mr Gould kept quiet in the face of what he saw as a disastrous Labour economic policy shift, away from the intervention­ist industrial strategy he had elaborated as trade and industry spokesman and to­wards an approach emphasising only “supply side” measures, mainly education and training.
The prospect of another frustrating pe­riod of not disagreeing in public with what he saw as party policy was under­standably unattractive for Mr Gould. What made it even worse was that, hav­ing been so roundly beaten in the Labour leadership contest this summer, he was in an even weaker position inside the Shad­ow Cabinet than he had been in the three years before the general election. Know­ing by last weekend that he was also cer­tain to lose his seat on the National Executive Committee, Mr Gould walked.
No one can blame him for doing so, but there is something deeply  disturbing  about   the   circum­stances. The impossibility of his predica­ment came about only because of the en­forcement last week of Shadow Cabinet collective responsibility on Europe and economic policy. Yet there was no need to foreclose Labour’s debate on these issues, apart, possibly, for last week’s emergency House of Commons debate on the econo­my. However essential it might be for any political party to present a show of unity in the couple of years before a general election, there is no convincing argument for Labour doing any such thing right now.
It is less than six months since the par­ty suffered a humiliating general election defeat. It has still only begun to chew over why it lost and what it should do next. Two years of free and frank debate, with the tolerance of the widest range of views at every level of the party is essen­tial if Labour is to have any hope of get­ting to grips with its predicament.
The departure of Mr Gould is a worry­ing sign that the Labour leadership thinks that the debate is not neces­sary. It also inevitably casts a shadow of doubt over the seriousness of John Smith’s promise during the leadership campaign to operate a more relaxed disci­plinary regime than his predecessor. The least we should now expect from Mr Smith is a ringing declaration of the val­ue he places on dissent in the Labour Party.

THE ALTERNATIVE TO MAASTRICHT IS WORSE

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Tribune leader, 25 September 1992

Even though the French referendum resulted in a narrow yes to the Maas­tricht treaty, the treaty is in deep trouble. No way has yet been found around the Danish no in June, and unless the Danes change their minds the treaty falls. More importantly, the exchange rate mechanism of the European Mone­tary System, which is at the heart of Maastricht’s provisions for economic and monetary union, is in crisis. Last week’s orgy of speculation ended with the pound and the lira dropping out of the ERM.
At the very least, it now seems in­evitable that the timetable for economic and monetary union in the Maastricht treaty will have to be revised. Most com­mentators reckon that, as the dust settles, the way that the ERM operates will be changed, with the German Bundesbank insisting on a reduction in its responsibil­ity for propping up other countries’ cur­rencies. Many predict that some sort of “two-speed” arrangement for monetary union will replace the Maastricht ap­proach, with the core economies of France, Germany and the Benelux coun­tries moving rapidly to a monetary union which the rest will join at some point in the future or perhaps not at all.
In the circumstances, it is hardly sur­prising that many left opponents of the Maastricht treaty in Britain have the scent of blood in their nostrils. There is a widespread belief even among supporters of closer European integration that Maas­tricht will force austerity on the whole of the European Community and will do lit­tle to democratise EC institutions. What’s more, the treaty seems to be even more vulnerable to a British no – either by way of a referendum or through defeat of the government’s Maastricht Bill in the House of Commons – than it was after the Danish referendum, in June.
So is there any reason Labour should not go in for the kill? Unfortunate­ly for those who like their politics simple, there is.
+++
Maastricht is essentially a compromise among the French, German and British governments. The French gave way on German demands that the proposed Eu­ropean central bank be independent and that the convergence criteria for econom­ic and monetary union be austere in the extreme; the Germans gave way to French and British insistence that the deal on political union did not give very much power to the European Parliament. (The British also got their opt-outs on monetary union and the social chapter.)
Immediately after the Danish no, it was at least possible that a renegotiated Euro­pean union treaty would take account of the Danes’ worries about EC democracy by including far greater powers for the European Parliament and would address their fears about the future of the welfare state by beefing up Maastricht’s social side and ending the British social chapter opt-out.
If Labour had then swiftly announced that it was opposing Maastricht with the goal of replacing it with such a treaty and if it had persuaded other EC social demo­cratic parties to back its position, there might just have been a hope of Labour acting as a catalyst for a renegotiation on a more social democratic basis.
+++
In reality, however, nothing of the sort happened. Proponents of an anti-Maastricht pro-Europe position failed to win a majority in the Labour Party, let alone other social democratic parties, which all lined up in support of Maastricht. They argued that although the treaty was not perfect, it did contain enough – the social chapter for 11 out of 12 EC countries, the extra powers for the European Parliament and the regions, the commitment to social solidarity – to make it worthy of support. The
opposition camp in most EC countries was left to the xenophobes.
Meanwhile, it became clear over the summer that, if Maastricht fell, what came next would almost certainly be worse, particularly on political union. In the aftermath of the Danish vote, it was not the German government’s position of strengthening integration by moving quickly to give more power to the Euro­pean Parliament that gained ground among EC governments as the favoured next step. Rather, it was the British gov­ernment’s idea of watering down integra­tion by maximising “subsidiarity” (code for continuing to carve up as much EC business as possible in closed intergov­ernmental meetings) that made the run­ning, a tendency that has been reinforced by the close French referendum result.
+++
Whether or not Maastricht sur­vives, there is now a real danger that, instead of making even small steps towards a Europe-wide democratic polity, governments will now pander to popular nationalism, dramatically slow­ing the pace of political integration. If Maastricht falls, it is likely that what re­places it as a pan-EC agreement will be little more than the status quo ante with a very different ERM and, perhaps, Ger­many, France and the Benelux countries going it alone with an economic and mon­etary union of their own.
This would effectively rule out the Eu­rope-wide strategies that are now Britain’s best hope for effective long-term counter-cyclical economic management. Britain might gain temporarily from its current outsider status, allowing the pound to devalue and interest rates to fall outside the ERM. But, in the end, the past two decades show that it is impossi­ble in modern capitalism for a medium-sized country to get lasting benefits from “dash for growth” policies.
The upshot is simple: if Labour is seri­ous about Europe-wide alternative eco­nomic strategies, it has to be committed to European union – and the Maastricht approach to European union, however flawed, is the only one on offer. Labour should be arguing for a devalued sterling to be returned to the ERM (if not at once). More important, it should not vote against the Maastricht Bill when it eventually finds its way to the Commons. There will be plenty of opportunity to address the democratic deficit and to push for left European economic and social policies after ratification. Without ratifi­cation, the democratic federal Europe that the left desperately needs will be­come once again a distant dream.

DEVALUATION BEATS AN INTEREST RATE HIKE

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Tribune leader, 18 September 1992

The president of the German Bundesbank, Helmut Schlesinger, might be insufficiently politically accountable; he certainly deserves to take a large measure of the blame for the recession now afflicting all of western Europe. If the Bundesbank, obsessive about the dangers of inflation, had not run such high interest rates in the past couple of years, life would undoubtedly have been easier for everyone.
But on one thing, he is undoubtedly right, unlike the elected politicians who control, or rather claim to control, Britain’s monetary and fiscal policy. As Mr Schlesinger said in an interview published on Wednesday, sterling should have been devalued against the Deutschmark on Sunday, when the Italian lira devalued by 7 per cent, as part of a general realignment of currencies within the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System. Instead, the British government decided pig-headedly to maintain the pound’s parity with the Deutschmark, no matter what the cost to the economy.
After intervention in the currency markets to prop up sterling had failed, the government on Wednesday put up interest rates first by 2 percentage points – and then by another 3 percentage points after that had foiled to end the run on the pound. The government’s hope is that these moves, which are guaranteed to make worse the already dire recession, will end the speculation against sterling. But it is apparent that the feeling on the currency markets is that the pound is overvalued. Devaluation of sterling, if it has not happened by the time you read this, is on the cards. If the French vote no to Maastricht on Sunday, it is a virtual certainty.
During what now seems to have been the inexorable drift towards devaluation, the Labour leadership has gone out of its way not to appear in favour of devaluing the pound – a position that has drawn heavy fire from within the party, particularly from the anti-Maastricht soft left, whose intellectual flag-bearer, Bryan Gould, has long been a proponent of devaluation.
That the argument has been had is no bad thing: for the first time in several years, Labour has had a free and frank political discussion in public, which is most refreshing. John Smith should resist the calls from Gerald Kaufman and others for the devaluationists to be gagged and “collective responsibility” to be enforced. Moreover, even if some arguments for devaluation are unconvincing, it is difficult to disagree with the case for devaluation if the choice is between devaluation and higher interest rates, as it has been this week.
But those who have attacked the leadership position of keeping quiet about devaluation are not tactically right. Having kept their remarks on the possibilities of devaluation to the bare minimum, Mr Smith and the Shadow Chancellor, Gordon Brown, are now in an optimal position to attack the Tories when devaluation actually comes. John Major and Norman Lamont, unable to say that they are doing only what the opposition recommended, look set to get a deserved political ducking.
More members good, no members bad
Labour is broke. It needs more money – and fast. Usually, in times of trouble, the party turns to the trade unions. But they are broke too. And there’s no way that the party’s direct-mail fundraising operation can bring in any more money than it already does.
In  the  circumstances,  it  is perhaps unsurprising that the party has decided the  only option   is   to increase membership subscriptions for a year for  ordinary members from the current  £15. An extra £3 a member would make a lot of difference to the party’s finances.
The problem is that it’s not quite as simple as that. Even with generous discounts for people who can’t afford the full membership fee, if the proposed increase in subscription rates goes ahead, thousands of potential members will be deterred from joining and thousands of existing members will think twice about renewing.
Indeed, there is a danger that the numbers put off will be so large that the party will get no net financial benefit from putting up the subscription rates.
Given that Labour’s membership is already at a post-war low, it seems utterly mad to take such a risk.
Of course, the reason that Labour’s membership has declined is not simply that it has become too expensive to become or remain a member. But a far more sensible solution to Labour’s financial crisis would be a dramatic cut in subscription rates and a vigorous national recruitment drive. Where Labour Party membership is concerned, more really is better.

DEVALUATION – TRICK OR TREAT?

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Tribune, 18 September 1992

Paul Anderson examines Labour’s differences on exchange rate policy
“The impossibly high exchange rate is pushing up interest rates and turning Britain into a rust-bucket economy,” declared John Edmonds, general secretary of the GMB general union, at the TUC congress in Blackpool last week. “Most people in industry know that the pound is overvalued against the Deutschmark. Realignment is now in­evitable.”
At the time, Edmonds was careful not to call explicitly for a unilateral devaluation of sterling, although it was clear that he thought that such a devaluation would be better than inaction. By Sunday, however, after the devaluation of the Italian lira, he came out explicitly in favour of similar treatment of the pound, describing the British failure to devalue at the same time as the Italians as a “missed opportunity”.
What is most remarkable about this in­tervention is that Edmonds is not the usual sort of Labour devaluationist. He is a long-standing enthusiast for European eco­nomic and monetary union (the GMB tabled the pro-Maastricht motion at the TUC) and a firm believer in British mem­bership of the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System. In recent years, Labour proponents of devaluation have typically been Euro-sceptics, oppo­nents of ERM membership (or at very least unenthusiastic about it) and believers in a national-Keynseaian approach to economic management.
Probably the most consistent and coher­ent spokesmen for this point of view have been Peter Shore, the veteran anti-EC Right-winger, and Bryan Gould, now Labour’s spokesman on national heritage. Both of them start from a belief that ster­ling has been consistently over-valued for years. Gould made devaluation one of the cornerstones of his unsuccessful campaign for the Labour leadership and deputy lead-leadership earlier this year. “If we continue to defend an overvalued currency we will continue to crucify manufacturing in­dustry,” he told Tribune in May.
Gould has moved away from advocating unilateral devaluation of sterling: he now favours devaluation as part of a general re­alignment of currencies within the ERM. But his position is still tied up with opposi­tion to the process of European monetary union laid out in the Maastricht treaty. His assault last weekend on “governments which persist in defending an overvalued pound” followed a swingeing attack on the deflationary implications of Maastricht. The same hostility to Maastricht charac­terises the other prominent Labour politi­cians who have spoken out in favour of de­valuation in the past week: John Prescott, David Blunkett and Peter Hain.
It is, of course, unsurprising that the question of devaluation has been linked with that of Maastricht. The ERM semi-­fixed exchange rate system is envisaged by Maastricht as a stage in the process that ends in a single European currency and a European central bank. Even if the thesis that sterling has historically been overval­ued is wrong (and it is notoriously difficult to prove either way), there is no doubt that the pound’s value in the ERM has been sus­tained in recent months only by govern­ment intervention in the money markets and by high interest rates, which are hold­ing back the recovery of the British econo­my.
But what Edmonds’s intervention indi­cates is that there is a growing belief even among Labour supporters of the ERM and the Maastricht treaty that the government’s policy of maintaining sterling’s val­ue is having a disastrous effect on the British economy and that it is not enough for Labour to respond by changing the sub­ject or by arguing that the Deutschmark should be revalued upwards against the other ERM currencies.
On the Edmonds view, the problem is not with the ERM, semi-fixed exchange rates or economic and monetary union in principle but with the attempt to maintain ERM par­ities despite Germany’s decision to put up interest rates to dampen inflation in the wake of German unification. As a result, all the other ERM member countries, and all those with currencies “shadowing” the Deutschmark or the European Currency Unit, were forced to put up their own inter­est rates in order to maintain their curren­cies’ value against the Deutschmark. The Bundesbank eased the pressure on interest rates everywhere except Britain with its minuscule cut in interest rates on Monday, but the Deutschmark remains undervalued against most of the other European currencies.
Although the simplest solution would be simply for the Germans to revalue the Deutschmark upwards against the other ERM currencies, the argument goes, the unwillingness of the Germans and French to sanction any such course means that Britain should devalue sterling just as the Italians devalued the lira on Sunday.
This position would have been anathema to the Labour leadership before the elec­tion, partly for tactical reasons – devalua­tion means price increases on all imported goods, which would be difficult if not impos­sible to sell to voters, and the very prospect of a pro-devaluation party coming to power would create turmoil on the currency markets – but partly because of scepticism among Labour’s advisers about the useful­ness of devaluation as a tool of policy.
Devaluation, the sceptics argued, is not a means of cutting interest rates. It works (insofar as it does) by cutting real wages and could easily set off an uncontrollable spiral of wage and price inflation. Worse, in Britain it would not work very well. Domestic British manufac­turing was in such a dire state that British companies would not be able to meet the potential demand at home or abroad for competitively priced British-made goods. The priority for Britain was not devalua­tion but an effective strategy for overcom­ing the structural weaknesses of its econo­my: crumbling infrastructure, poor educa­tion and training and so on.
It is in this light that the reluctance of the Labour leadership in the past week to endorse devaluation must be seen. As Shadow Chancellor and trade and industry spokesman before the election, John Smith and Gordon Brown were wedded to an ap­proach to economic policy that eschewed devaluation; today, as Labour leader and Shadow Chancellor, they remain extremely cautious.
Smith responded to last week’s calls for devaluation by saying that he was “not in favour of a devaluation of sterling because that would not assist in reducing interest rates”, although he added that the EC should “not rule out a revaluation of the Deutschmark”.
His remarks were echoed by Brown, who announced that “Labour is not the party of devaluation”, emphasising the centrality to Labour’s approach of “an emergency em­ployment programme”, concentrated partic­ularly on housing and public works, and “concerted Europe-wide action” to bring down interest rates and end the recession. Brown reacted to the devaluation of the lira and subsequent Bundesbank decision to cut interest rates by calling for the British Gov­ernment to emulate not the Italians but the Germans.
Instead, after massive intervention by the Bank of England failed to stem specula­tion against sterling, the government put up interest rates by a total of 5 per cent on Wednesday. But sterling remains under pressure and many now believe that deval­uation is inevitable, particularly if the French vote no to Maastricht on Sunday. It would not take the most apocalyptic sce­nario now doing the rounds, complete col­lapse of the ERM following a French no, for Labour’s arguments over the past fortnight to be entirely irrelevant within a few days.

STILL OUT IN THE COLD

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Tribune, 4 September 1992


On the eve of the TUC Congress, Paul Anderson looks at the issues facing Britain’s trade unions

Next week’s TUC Congress in Blackpool was supposed to be the first in years that everyone took seriously.

With Labour in government, the unions would be back in the corridors of power, if not enjoying beer and sandwiches with Neil Kinnock at Number Ten.

Instead, Labour lost the election and the unions face four or five more years out in the cold. Far from being a celebration of a return to political relevance, Blackpool looks set to be dominated by rumination over the unions’ long-standing problems.

The most obvious of these is that the number of union members is declining and has been for more than a decade. Accurate figures are difficult to come by because trade unions exaggerate their membership figures. But in 1979, the peak of union membership, there were 12,172,508 workers in TUC-affiliated unions according to the unions’ own statistics. This year’s figure has yet to be published, but the estimate is about 7,757,000, a drop of more than one-third. On these trends, membership of TUC-affiliates will be lower at the end of this year than at any time since the second world war.

Last year, the vast majority of affiliated unions saw membership decline. Of those with more than 100,000 members, only two gained members last year: NALGO and the CPSA. The AEU (now merged with the non-TUC EETPU in the AEEU) experienced a net loss of 99,000, 11 per cent of the 1991 total, and both the TGWU and the GMB suffered net losses of 8 per cent. All trade unions, but particularly the big general unions, experience a constant turnover of membership. The GMB, for example, which says that its loss rates are better now than six months ago, is currently recruiting 17,000 new members a quarter, but 25,000 are leaving.
Most unions blame the recession for declining membership. “While these figures are disappointing, they say more about the state of the economy than they do about trade unions,” said Norman Willis, the TUC general secretary, when the January 1992 membership statistics were released.

But although the recession is part of the problem (when workers lose their jobs, they usually leave their union and no one joins a union when unemployed) it is not the whole story. With notable exceptions, union membership declined even during the boom years of the late eighties.

The reasons for this are many and complex, and differ from union to union. In the early eighties, the decline of manufacturing hit all the blue-collar unions hard, but particularly the TGWU and AEU. Membership of the NUM collapsed because of pit closures and the secession of the Nottinghamshire miners over the 1984-85 strike. The print unions declined as a result of changes in printing technology.


More generally, unions have always found it easiest to recruit and organise among full-time permanent workers in large enterprises with employers who recognise unions. Since the late seventies, however, employers have become increasingly reluctant to recognise unions, the average size of the workplace has shrunk and there has been a massive growth in the importance of part-time and temporary work.

Add the effects of 13 years of Tory hostility to trade unions, and it is perhaps unsurprising that the unions have fallen on hard times. The question is what they can do about it.

The process of small unions amalgamating with each other to form bigger ones is almost as old as the movement itself but it has noticeably gathered pace as unions have grappled with the financial problems caused by declining membership and looked to mergers as a way of reducing overheads. Since 1979, the number of TUC affiliates has fallen from 109 to 74.

The TGWU has swallowed the agricultural workers. What was the GMWU has swallowed the boilermakers, textile workers and garment workers and acquired a white-collar wing, APEX, to become today’s GMB. Four print unions have been reduced to one, the GPMU; the SOPS and the CSU have become the NUCPS; ASTMS and TASS have created MSF; the NUR and NUS have formed RMT; and the AEU and EETPU have amalgamated into the AEEU. Next year, COHSE, NUPE and NALGO will merge into a giant public sector union, Unison, with around 1,400,000 members.


All this might be a mere taste of what is to come, however. The industrial logic of a merger between the TGWU and the GMB has long been apparent to many, but deep cultural and political differences have prevented it from being taken seriously by officials in either union. But now there are signs that the ice has been broken. No official merger talks are going on yet, but both unions are moving towards closer co-operation and have agreed to end their traditional rivalry.

With Unison in place, the creation of a giant “Transport, General and Municipal Workers Union”, some 2 million strong, would mean that nearly half of British trade unionists were concentratectin two unions. It would also inevitably put pressure on medium-sized unions to merge, either with one another or with one of the big two.

It is not too ridiculous to suggest that, within a decade, four or five super-unions might account for 95 per cent of British trade unionists: say, a TGWU-GMB-RMTUSDAW-UCATT-NUM general union, a Unison-CPSA-NUCPS-IPMS-IRSF public sector union, a GPMU-BECTU-NCU-UCWSTE media and communications union, an NUT-NAS/UWT-NATFHE-AUT education union and a BIFU-MSF-AEEU manufacturing and banking union.

This is speculation, of course: plenty stands in the way of the development of super-unions. But they are certainly in the air, even if the TUC Congress will refer to them only obliquely in a debate on the future of the TUC. Even before the next round of mergers, many of the big trade unions are wondering whether they couldn’t do on their own all that the TUC currently does for them. There has been constant off-the-record criticism from the big unions of the Willis regime at Congress House and several of them submitted Congress resolutions this year calling for the TUC to focus its work rather more on areas that individual unions cannot cover.

With money tight, a radical slimming-down of the TUC seems inevitable in the next eouple of years unless it can make itself indispensable in new ways. But financial pressures are not the only reason that trade unions are thinking big.


With the completion of the European internal market at the end of this year, and with the growing importance of the EC in determining the social and industrial context in which British unions operate, they are haying to develop European strategies for organisation and lobbying.

There are, naturally, divisions over tactics on the Maastricht treaty. Although the union movement is united in condemning the British Government’s opt-out on the social chapter and in its enthusiasm for stronger links with continental unions, there is likely to be a big argument in Blackpool next week about whether the unions should press for ratification of Maastricht even without the social chapter (the GMB position) or whether they should oppose ratification.
In the longer term, however, the most fundamental disagreements over Europe are likely to focus on the question of how far the unions should go for a continental “works council” model of industrial relations in Britain. Some unions see works councils with legal rights to represent workers as a step forward for British trade unionism, particularly if the works councils follow the German practice of excluding management representation. (The French system is of joint worker-management works councils.) Others, particularly on the left, argue that works councils of any description would weaken union organisation and should be opposed.

It is difficult to discern which position currently has the upper hand, although there is no doubt that advocates of works councils have multiplied in the past few years as the unions’ workplace strength has shrunk and the Tory Government has destroyed the last remnants of union influence in the corridors of power. The trend is likely to continue as the realisation sinks in that the April election result has ruled out the possibility for at least four years even of the partial return to corporatism promised by Labour’s “National Economic Assessment”.

Indeed, the outlook for the next few years of this Tory Government is bleak for the unions. The Conservative manifesto promised a raft of legislation to make life difficult and a new Employment Bill is one of the main pieces of business in the next session of Parliament.
The Bill is designed, in the words of the manifesto, to “make automatic deduction of union membership dues without written authorisation unlawful”, to “give individuals greater freedom in choosing a union”, to “legislate to require that all pre-strike ballots are postal and subject to independent scrutiny, and that at least seven days’ notice of a strike is given after a ballot” and to give people who use public services “the right to restrain the disruption of those services by unlawful action”.

What many unions fear most is the proposal to end “check-off payments of dues, although the GMB and others have long argued that this is a notoriously inefficient way of collecting subscriptions and should be replaced by a system of individual workers paying by bankers’ order.

Almost as disruptive is the idea of giving individuals “greater freedom in choosing a union”, by which the Government means the ending of the Bridlington Agreement among the unions not to poach members from one another.

This particularly affects the position of the non-TUC Electrical Section of the AEEU which (as the EETPU) was expelled from the TUC for poaching in 1988 and has since taken an unremittingly predatory attitude towards other unions organising in areas where it has members. The AEEU as a whole will be balloting soon on TUC affiliation and the big unions want the former EETPU back in the club. Critics of the electricians who want the former EETPU to give up its ill-gotten gains before it is allowed back are worried that a TUC without Bridlington will give the AEEU carte blanche to carry on as before.

Blackpool is likely to witness a lively debate on the question of re-admitting the electricians. Almost as spectacular will be the now annual showdown, between Arthur Scargill of the NUM and nearly everyone else, on Tory anti-union laws, with Scargill arguing for non-co-operation and the rest insisting that the Tories’ legislation should be replaced with a positive framework for industrial relations legislation. As usual in recent years, however, the most interesting discussions at this TUC Congress will be the informal ones that take place in the bars and restaurants around the conference centre.

ALPHABET SOUP
AEEU: Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union; AEU: Amalgamated Engineering Union; APEX: Association of Professional, Executhss, Clerical and Computer Staff; ASTMS: Association of Scientific, Technical end Managerial Staffs; AUT: Association of University Teachers; BECTU: Broadcasting, Entertainment and Cinematograph and Theatre Union; BIFU: Banking, insurance and Finance Union; COHSE Confederation of Health Service Employees; CPSA: Civil and Public Services Association; CSU: Civil Service Union; EETPU: Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunication and Plumbing Union; GMWU: General and Municipal Workers’ Union; GPMU: Graphical, Paper and Media Union; IPMS: Instibnion of Professionals, Managers and Specialists; IFtSF: Inland Revenue Staff Federation; MSF: Manufacturing, Science, Finance; NALGO: National and Local Government Officers Association; NAS/UWT National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers; NATFHE: National Associsdion of Teachers In Further and Higher Education; NCU: National Communications Union; NUCPS: National Union of Civil and Public Servants; NUM: National Union of Mineworkers; NUPE National Union of Public Employees; NUT: National Union of Teachers; RMT: National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers; STE Society of Telecom Executives; TASS: Technical, Aciministfative and Supervisory Staffs; TGWU: Transport and General Workers’ Union; UCW: Union of Communication Workers; UCKIT: Union of Construction, Ailed Trades and Technicians; USDAW: Union of Shop, DIstriludive and Ailed Workers

LABOUR’S SHABBY CAPITULATION ON BOSNIA

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Tribune leader, 21 August 1992

Labour’s silence on the crisis in Bosnia – or, rather, its barely audible mumbling about sanctions and hu­manitarian aid – is, of course, explicable. It is, after all, a terribly complex crisis and, from April until July, Labour was stuck with a shadow Foreign Secretary whose main concern was his impending retirement to the back benches.
Gerald Kaufman’s replacement, Jack Cunningham, unfortunately knows noth­ing whatever about foreign affairs and thus has to be kept in purdah. Worse still, the second-in-command at foreign affairs, George Robertson, is almost as clueless. He has spent most of the past decade dealing with the minutiae of EC affairs and has shunned non-Foreign Office ad­vice on the break-up of Yugoslavia. To cap it all, the party has not replaced its senior international officer, Mike Gapes, who became an MP in April.
Is this any way to run a political party that hopes to be taken seriously, let alone one with ambitions for government office within five years? What has happened in Bosnia in the past five months is not a “civil war” requiring from Britain 1,800 “peace-keeping troops” to escort food convoys: it is the most outrageous case of naked aggression in Europe since the sec­ond world war.
The complicity of the governments of western Europe in the Serbian land-grab, codified in the EC’s cantonisation plan for Bosnia of March 18, ranks with the 1938 Munich agreement as an example of cowering before militarist expansionism.
The Foreign Office, moreover, has been in the vanguard of this disastrous diplo­macy. Even if it were too late to intervene militarily to repel the bloody advance the Serbian irregulars (and it is not, despite the cosy consensus among much of the “quality” press that Bosnia should be written off) Labour should surely be at­tacking the government for its incompe­tence, prevarication and turpitude.
Instead, the party’s spokesmen, suppos­edly on a “summer offensive” against the Tories, have gone out of their way to avoid offending the government. Since he took over from the ineffectual Mr; Kaufman, Mr Cunningham has bravely avoided public appearances. Meanwhile, Mr Robertson has. uttered, not a word of criticism of the EC or the Foreign Office, opening his mouth only to express his . sense of helplessness and, unforgivably, to back the government’s rejection of the use of armed force except in a “peace­keeping” role – a position that guarantees Serbian hegemony in Bosnia.
It now seems that Labour is prepared even to endorse the government’s view that a show of air-power above Iraq to aid President George- Bush’s flailing re-election campaign is a greater priority for the international community than dealing with Bosnia (or indeed the Soma­li famine and civil war).
By any standards, this is a shabby performance, particularly on the part of Mr Cunningham: Mr Robertson can at least plead that he has only been following or­ders. Mr Cunningham should never have been appointed: unless he bucks up his ideas in the next month, he will deserve to lose his job.

BEYOND WELFARISM

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Tribune, 7 August 1992
Defending the welfare state is all very well, but it is not enough if Labour wants to win elections, argues Paul Anderson
With its leadership contest over, its new front bench team in place and the To­ries in disarray on the economy, it makes some sense for Labour to put behind it the soul-searching that followed the debacle of April 9 and to concentrate on attacking the government.
But it would be foolish for Labour to put everything into the promised summer offensive against John Major and forget the longer term. Even if a succession of opinion polls shows Labour under John Smith well ahead of the To­ries, the severity of the election de­feat will still demand some serious thinking about how Labour should pitch its appeal if it is to have a hope of winning in 1996 or 1997.
So far, unsurprisingly, most of the contributions to the debate about Labour’s predicament have been concerned with what went wrong in 1992. For want of better explanations, it is generally ac­cepted that the defeat had some­thing to do with certain key voters not trusting Labour and other key voters feeling that Labour would do nothing for them.
Beyond this consensus, however, has been little but sweeping statements of the continuing validity of Labour’s values and bickering about which details of style or sub­stance should have been changed for Labour to do better. Hardly anyone has dared to suggest that Labour’s whole strategy needs to be changed for the next election: that, instead of organising its ap­peal to voters around the core of defence of the welfare state, as it has done since the mid-eighties, it should adopt a radically different approach.
Yet that is precisely what Labour needs. Instead of falling back on defence of the welfare state, the party must frame its programme for 1996 or 1997 with Europe and economic policy at the core and significant roles for environmentalism and democratisation.
Europeanisation
The future of Europe was barely mentioned during the election campaign, mainly because of a general sense among politicians that only they are interested.
On the detail of the Common Agricultural Policy (or even the Maastricht treaty), such a view is probably correct. But there are good reasons for questioning it in other areas. The perception that Britain lags behind its EC part­ners in wages, technology, social provision, transport, culture – in fact, just about every indicator of prosperity – is widespread among the public. Unease about the To­ries’ lukewarm attitude to the whole project of European union is commonplace. So too, however, is the notion that the EC as currently constituted is remote, bureaucratic and undemocratic.
Labour can tap all these feelings by articulating a vision of a Britain fully committed to a democratic federal Europe in which:
  • the European Parliament is giv­en massively increased powers at the  expense  of the  intergovern­mental Council of Ministers and the non-elected Commission;
  • the   principle   of  subsidiarity (maximum appropriate decentrali­sation of decision-making) is applied not to empower national gov­ernments but to give a greater role to elected regional and local government;
  • a high priority is given to widen­ing the EC to include the countries of the European Free Trade Area and the former Soviet bloc.

Economic strategy
On its own, however, a radical shift in Labour’s position on the political organisation of Europe is not enough. The economic poten­tial of Europeanisation needs to be tapped.
Put crudely, Labour’s main problem hi the 1992 election was popular disbelief in the efficacy of its proposed remedies for Britain’s economic crisis. Labour was still considered by a large number of its target middle-class voters to be in­capable of managing the economy, while many working-class voters, traditionally its core supporters, did not reckon that the party’s rather timid proposals would do anything to put the country back to work. Labour’s economic policy came over as essentially a policy for redistribution – tax and bene­fits – and nothing else.
This was mainly because Labour’s economic advisers were saying, quite rightly, that there was no hope of a Labour govern­ment being able to put some sort of late-seventies-style alternative economic policy into practice. As President Francois Mitterrand found to his cost in the early eight­ies, Keynesianism in one country is no longer feasible.
Labour’s problem was that it had nothing to replace Keynesian­ism in one country as an approach to managing the economy. “Sup­ply-side” measures apart, it really was reduced to offering redistribu­tion and nothing else.
Just about the only way round this is to develop a Europe-wide reflationary economic strategy, ini­tially to be carried out intergovernmentally but to be transferred to democratically accountable Euro­pean institutions as soon as possi­ble.
Of course, Labour could not de­velop such a strategy on its own, let alone implement it: it would, at very least have to draw its sister European social democratic parties into the frame and would almost certainly have to go further, bring­ing in non-party economists as well as sympathetic Christian Democrats and liberals.
Democratisation
The Europeanisation theme can be carried still further if Labour frames its plans for constitutional reform in the language of catching up with the democracies of our EC partners. First-past-the-post elec­tions for parliament, an unelected second chamber and rigid central­ism make British democracy a laughing stock throughout the EC.
The idea that “electoral reform” lost Labour the last election and should therefore be shunned is ut­terly without foundation. Certain­ly, Labour leaders made fools of themselves a week before polling day by refusing to give straight an­swers about the party’s intentions, but that was a matter of indeci-siveness tinged with opportunism, not electoral reform.
It is also doubtless true that the prospect of a Liberal Democrat-Labour coalition government put off many disillusioned Tory sup­porters who were toying with the idea of voting Liberal Democrat. That was simply a by-product of the closeness in the opinion polls of the two main parties, which in­evitably led to media speculation about possible governing coali­tions.
Labour should move as quickly as possible to adopt the Additional Member System for the House of Commons, regional assemblies and the Scottish and Welsh parlia­ments. This is the only system to combine one-member constituen­cies and proportionality. The party should propose a new federal sec­ond chamber composed of repre­sentatives of the regional assem­blies.
This is essentially the structure of the German political system. Its advantages in delivering stable growth and affluence to its citizens could be exploited ruthlessly by Labour.
Empowerment
But electoral reform and regional­ism are not the only elements of the democratisation programme that Labour should develop. One of the biggest successes of the Tory Party in the past 13 years has been to persuade people that it stands up for those who feel pow­erless in the face of state bureau­cracy.
The right-to-buy scheme for council tenants persuaded thou­sands that the Tories meant to give people control over the things that most affected their everyday lives. Opt-out schools could play a similar role in the nineties.
Labour has to develop a populist anti-bureaucratic politics of the Left. This does not mean reluctant­ly accepting Tory measures as faits accomplis. Nor does it mean mere­ly adopting a rhetoric of opposition to “vested interests” or simply promising entrenched rights. Labour has to take the initiative across the board with bold, tangi­ble proposals for empowerment in every sphere.
Giving people a greater say at work – with a programme to en­courage rapid growth of producer co-operatives and democratic em­ployee share-ownership schemes, a commitment to a “co-determina­tion” model of industrial relations, and policies to give new rights to trade unionists and to members of pension schemes – must be a prior­ity.
So must proposals to encourage self-build housing schemes and self-management of housing for those unwilling or unable to buy, measures to democratise and de­centralise local government and the health and education services, and policies to increase consumer rights far beyond what is envis­aged by the government’s various charters.
The goal of empowerment should be central to Labour’s Com­mission on Social Justice, which must be a fundamental review of the party’s approach to tax and benefits and not an excuse merely to chip away at the principle of universality hi welfare provision.
Universality is essential if the welfare system is to give people the sense of security that is the prerequisite for confident au­tonomous action. For Labour to ac­cept the Tory view that all we need is a minimal “safety net”, means-tested welfare system would be disastrous. Indeed, there is a strong case to be made for extend­ing rather than reducing the scope of universality by adopting a basic income scheme as the core of a new welfare settlement.
Environmentalism
The environment was another big issue notable by its absence from the 1992 general election cam­paign. The consensus among the politicians, apparently borne out by the opinion polls, was that in the middle of a recession voters are less concerned with global warm­ing than with jobs and mortgages.
Whatever the truth of this con­sensus, it is likely that the next election will not be taking place in a recession and that worries about the environment among voters will be even more widespread than in the late eighties.
Meanwhile, the need for govern­ment action, especially on global warming, will have become more urgent and more apparent, much to the embarrassment of the To­ries, with their attachment to non­intervention and “letting market forces decide”.
Once again, Labour has an op­portunity to seize the initiative by developing an alternative pro­gramme, particularly on energy, where Labour should go for giving a massive boost to research into sources of renewable energy, and transport, where the need to re­duce carbon dioxide emissions meshes perfectly with Labour’s en­thusiasm for public transport. Once again, the British government’s poor record compared with most of our EC partners should be  a focus for Labour’s attack.
Demilitarisation
With the end of the cold war, the government is making severe cuts in defence spending. We have al­ready seen massive redundancies among defence sector workers and there are many more to come.
Labour’s response so far has been cautious in the extreme. The party promised a defence diversification agency at the 1992 election but, largely because an inordinate amount of time had been spent ar­guing about who would oversee it, very little work had been done on what the agency would actually do. Developing the proposal for a DDA is now a high priority.
But Labour needs more than just a policy for the defence indus­try: it has to work out what Britain’s defence needs really are. Calling for a full defence review and arguing that British nuclear weapons should be included in multilateral arms reduction nego­tiations might have worked as a holding operation in the run-up to the last election but in the next five years the party will have to go much further.
The whole security system in Europe is in a state of crisis. With the Soviet threat no more, the Balkans torn by war and ethnic tensions in the former Soviet Union threatening to explode, NATO is desperately searching for a role in the post-cold-war world. Pressure is growing for the devel­opment of the Western European Union into the main security or­ganisation on the continent. With the current pace of nuclear arms reduction talks, the time is fast ap­proaching when the other nuclear powers demand that French and British nuclear forces are included in negotiations.
Labour needs to do some deep thinking: first, about what it wants (and what is needed) from a new European security system and, secondly, about its precise ne­gotiating positions on nuclear arms. In both cases, its delibera­tions should be informed by the conviction that the demilitarisa­tion of international relations is the best way of ensuring lasting peace and security.
All this does not in itself add up to a detailed programme for Labour in the next five years. But it is, I hope, the basis for a coher­ent and credible left agenda for the mid-nineties and beyond, with plenty to appeal to working-class and middle-class voters. Does any­one out there agree?

LEFT UNITY: NICE IDEA, SHAME ABOUT REALITY

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Tribune leader, 7 August 1992

For some on the left, the lessons of Labour’s leadership contest and John Smith’s distribution of Shadow Cabi­net and front-bench posts are clear. “The triumph of the right is now complete,” declared Ken Livingstone in the New Statesman last week. The genuine soft left has to cut itself free from the Brown, Blair, Cook, Straw ‘realist’ wing, recog­nising that in everything but name, these people are now on the right wing of the party every bit as much as Jack Cunning­ham.” The left of the Tribune Group of MPs should line up with the Campaign Group and run a joint slate of candidates for the next set of Shadow Cabinet elec­tions, he argued.
Few have expressed themselves so di­rectly and publicly, but a version of Mr Livingstone’s position is shared by plenty of other left MPs. In the medium term at least, left unity in parliament is a high priority, they believe.
Up to a point, it is difficult to disagree. Labour is insufficiently radical and is in danger of getting even worse. The idea of persuading radicals in the Parliamentary Labour Party to work together is an at­tractive one. If, instead of squabbling, left MPs could come together on a com­mon platform, the chances of putting Labour on a radical course might be in­creased.
The problem is that it is increasingly difficult to define the Labour left as a group of people with a common political platform. Of course, the left has common values. Anti-militarism is one; the sense that labour should be empowered against capital is another. The left believes that people should have more control over the decisions that fundamentally affect their everyday lives.
So one could go on – but these common values do not yield agreement on the great issues of the day. On these, from the European Community through electoral reform to the importance of Green poli­tics, the left is deeply divided. Most im­portant, on the economy, where once there was left consensus on the neo-Keynesian protectionism of the Alternative Economic Strategy, there is not one left position but a raft of competing ideas, with fundamental disagreements about devaluation, the possibilities of European alternative economic strategies, nationalisation and much more besides.
Add the continuing arguments on the left about toleration of Leninist entrists in the Labour Party and about the future of the block vote at Labour conference, and it is difficult to see how a comprehen­sive platform could be devised to bring together the left rather than divide it.
It follows that it is not always very easy these days to define who isn’t on the left. Abandoning principles in the pursuit of power is all too familiar a phenomenon, and it is just about possible that some or even all of “the Brown, Blair, Cook, Straw ‘realist’ wing” of the soft left have sold the pass on everything they once be­lieved, as Mr Livingstone claims. But the evidence for his assertion is patchy, to say the least.
Unless serious signs of apostasy ap­pear, the energy that Mr Livingstone would like to see spent on realigning and rebuilding the left would be better used simply to encourage open no-holds-barred debate on Labour’s future, no one in the party excluded.
BOSNIA NEEDS ARMED INTERVENTION TO SURVIVE
The six weeks since Tribune – then alone  among  British  newspapers – first argued for limited military inter­vention to save Sarajevo from the bloody siege by Serbian irregulars should have been used by the governments of west­ern Europe to make the necessary military preparations and then to send in the aircraft and troops.
Instead, the British and American governments have resisted all calls for military force to stop the siege, taking refuge in hand-wringing and hoping against hope that sanctions and peace talks will yield some result.
Meanwhile, the crisis in Bosnia has de­veloped precisely as any intelligent ob­server knew it would. The Serbs have consolidated their positions and contin­ued the grisly programme of “ethnic cleansing”; and the Croats, at first hesitant about getting in on the act in Bosnia for fear of what might result, have pitched in with a vengeance. The carving-up of Bosnia between Serbia and Croatia is now well advanced.
It is not too late to rescue the situation. Sarajevo is still holding out – just. However emboldened they have been by the criminal prevarication of the British and American governments, the Serbian mili­tias are still not in a position seriously to resist what the big powers could throw at them; the same goes for their Croatian counterparts. But in another couple of months  it will be too late.